Museum Internships as Sites of Institutional Reform
Rebecca Miralrio
Introduction
As an aspiring museum professional, I have completed five internships in four years at renowned art museums across New York City. Simultaneously, I’ve continued my formal education in art history, which increasingly engages with museum and curatorial studies. As a result, like many other art museum workers, I have cultivated a professional practice shaped by both theoretical analysis and hands-on experience.
When I look at my resume, I see a record of my curiosity and longing. Each entry reflects my effort to gain practical experience and learn about different career pathways, while deepening my understanding of the role of art museums. As an undergraduate art history student, I was encouraged to pursue internships as a way to get my foot in the door. Although my internships have been interspersed across a range of art world jobs, I have consistently returned to museums because I’m drawn to their potential as spaces for critical engagement and discourse. For me, meaningful work goes beyond showcasing art; it is about shaping conversations, challenging assumptions, and building structures that support artists, workers, and audiences alike.
While my internships provided valuable experience, they also revealed gaps in the institutional structures that shape museum work. I have experienced a disconnect between the promise of professional development and the reality of unsupported labor in dysfunctional environments. Ultimately, I have learned that museum internships often lack the structure, mentorship, and professional development to support a long-term career in the field. This not only affects interns in the short term, but also contributes to the very issues that weaken museums from within, such as managerial inefficiency, leadership instability, and institutional opacity—a condition in which institutions become less transparent and harder for both employees and visitors to assess or understand.1
I believe that the quality of an internship, including what interns learn passively, reflects the ways in which a museum is working well or not living up to its potential. By examining my own experiences as a museum intern, I hope to shed light on how the structure of internships can reveal deeper institutional inadequacies.
The Exception, Not the Rule
I began my first internship, as an Education and Digital Experience intern at the Guggenheim, in March 2021. Only a year into the COVID-19 pandemic, the program was conducted remotely and overseen by three museum employees: a senior manager, project manager, and education associate. As my first professional contact with art museums, this experience set a precedent for all my future internships.
On the first day, my cohort, consisting of four other interns, received access to a Google Drive folder containing a program syllabus and a subfolder for each week of the internship. We spent the first day orienting ourselves with one another, the museum, and the program. We read through the syllabus, which thoroughly outlined a description of the program, expectations and objectives of our projects, a week-by-week schedule with deadlines, and relevant resources.
By the end of the internship, I had completed a digital education project centered on one artwork in the museum’s permanent collection. What made this internship successful was not just the content we produced but the intentional design of the program itself. It was well-conceived, with clear objectives and benchmarks. It balanced structured guidance with independent exploration, allowing for creativity within a defined framework. Most importantly, it reflected a commitment to mentorship, ensuring interns were supported by colleagues and mentors rather than left to navigate their roles alone.
Over the last four years, I have often reflected on the curriculum-based framework of my first internship, and I now realize that it was the exception, not the rule. As I moved into subsequent internships, particularly in curatorial work, I encountered museum departments marked by poor communication, disorganized workflows, burnout, and a culture of individualism. Many of these internships lacked a dedicated manager or a department to oversee intern programming. Sometimes I was the only intern. Without a coordinator or a cohort, I found the experience isolating and confusing. Furthermore, I began to see a pattern in which I was frequently assigned busywork with little context or connection to larger department projects or goals.
I also noticed that my supervisors were overwhelmed by their own responsibilities and struggled to manage my role effectively. In one of my most recent internships, weekly department check-in meetings were frequently canceled or rescheduled, as were my one-on-one meetings with my supervisor. I saw them working long hours, often arriving at the office before I did and staying after I left. Yet, despite their workload, they rarely assigned me meaningful tasks. Whenever I completed assignments, I received little to no feedback, making me feel that my work was not being reviewed attentively. On multiple occasions, my supervisor lamented their heavy workload, but never accepted my offers to take on more responsibility. I often had days with little to no assigned work, highlighting the disconnect between their overextension and my underutilization.
The difference between my first internship and those that followed has been stark. The first was intentionally structured, while my later experiences increasingly lacked cohesion and management. I see this problem as stemming not only from leadership’s lack of attention to internship programming, but also as an absence of accountability and structural support within curatorial teams. The majority of the junior curators to whom I reported appeared to have little preparation or training in how to supervise or mentor interns—a reflection of a broader trend in museums where professional development is often informal or underemphasized.2 Without the necessary support or guidance on how to thoughtfully integrate interns, supervisors who are already overextended can struggle to make them feel involved or useful.
When it comes to museum interns and the programs they participate in, who is assessing their effectiveness? Are museums actively evaluating how they train, educate, and mentor interns? These questions ultimately point to broader institutional challenges of resource allocation that look beyond financial reports. When leadership and management ignore systemic issues like poor planning, staff burnout, and a lack of investment in supervisor training, internships lose their value, and ineffective practices become ingrained in the museum’s organizational culture.
Learning to Endure: The Cycle of Neglect in Museum Internships
As my internship experiences have dwindled in their quality, it’s become more difficult to feel hopeful about the idea of a future in museums. I have often asked myself: where am I supposed to go for support when the very people and structures that should provide it—supervisors, program managers, HR—are often the ones perpetuating the dysfunction that I am experiencing?
When I have raised concerns to supervisors, I have often been met with thought-terminating clichés like “this is just the way things are.” These responses signal that structural issues are to be endured, not addressed. In one instance, after going to HR to seek further guidance and support, I had one supervisor say, “you could have just said something to me,” which placed the entire burden of communication on me, while ignoring the power dynamics that make speaking up difficult for interns. Yet HR also echoed troubling sentiments when they told me that, “there’s no such thing as a perfect job.” Instead of offering meaningful support, they excused disorganization and neglect, reinforcing a workplace culture that was failing to care for its most vulnerable members.
In addition to the dismissive rhetoric I have encountered, I have often been excluded from departmental conversations and projects. Rather than being integrated into the departments I have worked for, I have felt like temporary labor—present but peripheral. This has become especially evident in moments when supervisors, too overextended to engage with my contributions directly, have asked me to draft my own letters of recommendation. While this may be a practical necessity in some cases, it has reinforced a pattern of disengagement, where my professional growth felt like an inconvenience rather than an opportunity.
When museums dismiss interns’ concerns, ignore their potential, exclude them from departmental conversations, and leave them to advocate for themselves, they reinforce institutional neglect as an industry standard. By sharing my experiences as an intern, I reject the notion that structural and cultural issues within museums must be passively endured as norms of the sector.
Museum internships do not exist in isolation; they are foundational sites where museum culture is absorbed, replicated, or, with care, transformed. I imagine that many of my supervisors were once in my position—curious and ambitious young professionals with a profound passion for art who eventually adopted and began perpetuating the institutional norms that were modeled for them. I have come to see the dysfunction I have experienced in museums as a legacy of learned behaviors, passed down through generations of museum workers who, at some point in their careers, chose to accept these conditions as inevitable. It is at this site of choice where I see the most potential for change. If museums want to break these cycles of dysfunction, people across all levels of the institution must work together to design tools, structures, and practices that not only evaluate the internal culture of the museum, but also explicitly reform how interns are trained, integrated, valued, and supported in their respective departments.
Saving Time
In June 2024, I began reading Jenny Odell’s Saving Time, which reimagines our relationship to time beyond the capitalistic lenses of productivity and urgency. Drawing from ecological, pre-industrial, and geological timescales, Odell offers a vision of time rooted in place, embodiment, and care, specifically attentive to how speed and value are unevenly distributed across bodies and systems.
Inspired by Odell’s thinking, I have considered how her ideas might reshape the culture of museum work, starting with interns. If museums are to become truly sustainable, they must reassess how time is structured—not only in daily workflows, but in broader institutional rhythms. This includes questioning productivity norms, resisting urgency-driven planning, and creating slower, more intentional structures of mentorship and integration. Internships in particular offer a critical space to experiment with these ideas. What would it look like to design internship programs that prioritize learning over output, process over pace, and relational rather than extractive forms of labor?
Micro-Level: Rethinking Internships and Daily Workflow
One of the clearest examples of bad time management in museums is when interns are assigned busywork because their supervisors are themselves too busy to manage the workload thoughtfully. Instead of being given meaningful assignments, interns often find themselves performing repetitive tasks that contribute little to their learning or the museum’s larger goals.
A shift toward saving time in the museum workplace would require supervisors and managers to intentionally make time to collaborate with their interns. When supervisors take the time to build relationships with their interns, co-design projects, and provide feedback, they not only offer a deeper learning experience, but they also redistribute labor more sustainably. This approach reframes interns as partners in workload management—not a burden or an afterthought—and builds a culture of trust, shared responsibility, and long-term capacity. Put simply: making time now saves time later. Investing in interns as collaborators increases the likelihood that projects get completed with care, that institutional knowledge is shared, and that interns can grow into capable future colleagues.
Museums should also implement robust evaluation methods for their internship programs to assess both short-term and long-term impact. Surveys, exit interviews, and post-internship follow-ups can track whether interns were mentored, how prepared they felt for future roles, and what career paths they pursued. Crucially, museums should track whether they actually hire any of their former interns as more permanent employees. If the percentage is low, it raises an important question: why aren’t museums hiring people they’ve already trained?3 By treating interns as collaborators rather than temporary labor, museums can disrupt the cycle of extractive, low-value internship experiences and produce competitive candidates for future roles.
Macro-Level: Institutional Time and the Potential of the Sabbatical Model
In the summer of 2024, around the same time I began reading Odell’s book, the Vera List Center for Art and Politics announced its “Sabbatical Year” as a way to pause, reflect, and recalibrate its institutional rhythm and use of time.4 Instead of producing art exhibitions and programming at their regular pace, the Center chose to slow down in order to reassess its priorities and ways of working. What if museums adopted a similar approach, not just as a response to crises, but as a regular practice of care and sustainability? A structured pause like this could offer time to evaluate harmful work habits, reimagine internal workflows, and revisit institutional goals.
By stepping back from the pressure to constantly produce, museums might be better positioned to ask: what are we investing time in and why? Who gets time for mentorship, growth, reflection, and who doesn’t? In a sabbatical model, interns could be more thoughtfully integrated into institutional learning cycles, not just as support for overextended departments, but as participants in conversations about how museums function and how they might evolve.
Similarly, we could reimagine internships as cumulative experiences instead of temporary roles. This could take the form of a tiered, long-term model with entry-level internships for those with no prior experience and junior- and senior-level internships for those ready to move into the museum workforce. Each tier would build on the knowledge and skills acquired in the previous one, allowing interns to acclimate to the museum’s culture and structure over time.
Conclusion
Museums have long functioned with a similar sense of urgency as corporate culture without the same level of resources. By rethinking how time is structured at both the micro and macro levels—from the ways interns are trained and supported to how institutional values and rhythms are evaluated—museums can begin to build more ethical, sustainable, and inclusive workplaces. Instead of giving interns busywork, institutions could design programming with structured time for mentorship, feedback, and shared reflection. Approached this way, internships might become more than a line on a resume; they could become sites of transformation where emerging professionals and their mentors can co-create new ways of working together.
Endnotes
[1] Havi Carel and Ian James Kidd explain that when institutions lack transparency, it becomes harder for people to understand their norms, procedures, and expectations, resulting in feelings of confusion and alienation. Moreover, they argue that when an institution allows itself to become opaque it erodes its own commitment to equity and listening to others’ experiences. A clear example of this can be seen in how the Brooklyn Museum recently handled and communicated its decision to lay off staff. Havi Carel and Ian James Kidd, “Institutional Opacity, Epistemic Vulnerability, and Institutional Testimonial Justice,” International Journal of Philosophical Studies 29 (4): 473–96, https://doi.org/10.1080/09672559.2021.1997393.
[2] The founding of the Center for Curatorial Leadership (CCL) fellowship points to a recognized need within the field for formalized leadership and management training among museum curators, specifically. Established in 2007, the fellowship provides experienced curators with intensive instruction from Columbia Business School faculty and one-on-one mentorships with museum directors and civic leaders. The program’s curriculum reflects the reality that curators are often promoted into leadership positions without receiving foundational training in areas like staff management, institutional governance, or emerging professional mentorship. Read more about the fellowship on the CCL website.
[3] Museums should consider adopting a mindset similar to that of the medical field, where residency roles are treated as long-term training pipelines. While not every museum intern can or should be hired immediately, the lack of internal transition opportunities raises questions about whether museums genuinely see their interns as valuable future colleagues.
[4] “Sabbatical Year: Slowing Down and Recalibrating Our Rhythm,” Vera List Center, July 30, 2024, https://veralistcenter.org/announcement/sabbatical-year-slowing-down-and-recalibrating-our-rhythm.